Step 9: The Software (Real Time Linux)

Step 10: The Thesis for Masters in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering

For the more curious, here is the original document containing the Thesis for Masters in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering. It is writte...

If you can’t explore the Moon or Mars … you can always explore your neighborhood!

The main goal of this project is to alter a remote controlled vehicle and control it via Internet Telerobotics using the Mobile Telephone Network (WWAN - Wireless Wide Area Network) 3.5G or 4G (Long Term Evolution) and as an alternative you can always use WiFi networks.

For this challenge it is necessary to make some modifications to a remote-control car, adapting and equipping it with the necessary software and hardware in order to achieve the objectives stated above.

Step 1: Earth Exploration Videos

This first video shows th 3D Sketch of the Mobile Earth Rover.

Now form 3D to the real word, this second video shows some parts of the building stage and some initial test runs using the 3.5G network. The vehicle is equipped with a boom camera arm that allows 1st and 3rd person viewing, the camera also preforms pan and tilt movements.

This last video shows a test run in various places, where the maximum distance from the control room to the vehicle exceeds 1 Kilometer :

The vehicle has the capability of driving for 5 continues hours and In theory you can drive all over the place, as long as you have 3.5G coverage, the maximum i dared to go was about 1 km from base without supervision.

Step 2: The Idea

The main goal is to be able to remotely control an RC vehicle using the mobile phone Network (3.5G or 4G) controlled via Internet Telerobotics in order to explore your neighborhood, or let other people in remote locations do the exploring! This goal is possible by equipping an RC Truck with an on-board computer capable of connecting itself to the 3.5G/4G Network, thus making it ready to be controlled by any one with a computer with an Internet connection.

Note: - In the image above, the hexagons correspond to the mobile phone network coverage area. - The RC's Truck Transmitter is used as an USB plug and play device, to control the RC.

If you drive you E-Maxx at full speed using the Traxxas Transmitter each motor will consume around 30000mAh and reach 30+mph top speed. Depending on your batteries you can run at full speed for less than 10 min.

In this project the 2 motors of the E-Maxx are controlled by an Electronic Switch Controller that is in turn controlled by a Servo Micro-Controller instead of the Traxxas Transmitter, i designed the software that controls the Servo Micro Controller to limit the Speed of the Motors, so instead of 30+mph the rover can only go from 0mph to approximately 4 to 5 mph using two 4600mAh batteries. So at around 4 to 5mph the motors consume around 3800mAh 4000mAh, so in theory you can drive the motor for a little more than 1 hour at top speed (4 to 5 mph) with the 4600 mAh batteries.

When you are controlling the rover using Internet Telerobotics you don't drive at full speed all the time (4~5mph) unless you want to have an accident so i "calculated / guessed" that you can have a 5 hours autonomy if you do exploring instead of racing.

It all comes down to how you drive, the faster you drive the quicker your battery dies out.

hi, i found youre project really well made! i am doing something really similar, but i am using an ad'hoc connection beetween server and client, with power wifi adapter to have a quite wide range! I have one question for you are you happy by using motion for the streaming? cause i made test with vlc, and some other soft, but i never get a direct stream, i always had 3-4 seconds delay at best and it's too much for me... so motion is good for that according to you?

hi, thanks for all these informations! 0.5s latence is totally acceptable for me! and i don't need sound for my project cause it's a kind of explorating boat ! Anyway i will make tries when i will have a little more time! thanks a lot!

Sorry i totally messed up my comment, i am going to delete it, what i meant was:

I forgot to mention that with by using Motion or MJPG-Streamer you will get latency bellow 0.5 seconds, depending on your Internet connection.

keep in mind that Motion and MJPG-Streamer only do video streaming, so you will need an application to do audio streaming, and the best one for that is Murmur (server) / Mumble (client), with latency values bellow 0.5 seconds depending on your Internet connection.

Awesome project! You could change the eee-pc+arduino with only a raspberry Pi to make smaller and cheaper if you haven't a netbook (Rasp Pi costs around 25$) :D. I'm not sure, but I think Raspberry Pi GPIO could be used to communicate with the servo controller, so you don't need an extra arduino board. I think I'm going to build one with my old and dusty RC car. Maybe it won't be so cool, but will be funny.

Yes a Raspberry Pi would probably work, i am going to make a new instructables called "Mobile Earth Rover 2" i did in 2010 using a Single Board Computer called "FoxBoard G20" that is similar to the Raspberry Pi.

I was asked for some help on installing a Xenomai patched Linux Kernel so i updated the instructables with the XENOMAI HOW-TO on Debian distribution. Look at step 9 The Software: (Real Time Linux) for instructions.

Thank you for your comment, indeed rear view would be very nice, an alternative is to hack the "pan servo" to do 360º having in mind that the Webcam is attached by a cable so you have to be careful not to tangle it.

I love this project. It seems that the eepc is the main drawback because it is rather large and heavy to be placed on the rc vehicle. Would it be possible to do this project using a smaller device capable of running Linux? If you could eliminate the eepc and use a smartphone or similar device, this whole system could be much more compact.

Thanks for the comment. I used the Traxxas E-Maxx because it is huge and scales 1:10 from a real sized car, if you put hard springs on the RC it can support a lot of weight.In that regard a EeePC is quite lite for making an on-board computer.You can use a Single Board Computer or a Smartphone as i did in my other projects and had the same results.

Hi, this is really cool. I am thinking of building one myself. Bu how much would it cost if I already had the car, laptop and camera? Also, do you pay for using the 3g internet? If I make one I will post it as a video response to one of your vids :)

Very cool project!! I'm gonna start tomorrow on similar. I have one little question:) How do you have so much trust in leaving the car/laptop in the streets without fear of theft!? Or was it watched all the time?

Thanks for the comment, regarding your question, i live in an area near the University where the residents are mostly students, teachers and old aged people, i live for many years so i know many people how live nearby and this area there is no crime.

I have confidence that no one will steal it because if you are in public with the rover no one will steal it while others are watching, it all comes down to your confidence in the people how live in the neighborhood, if you have crime in your neighborhood don't leave the rover on it's own, if you don't have crime you are good to go.

My advice is to explore places where there are lots of people and during day time, so you can feel safe, if you don't feel safe go to a place where you do.Or you can always ask a friend to walk alongside with the rover in the initial explorations in order to build up your confidence.